New experiences

 

I had prepared a topic I was going to talk about this week and then something that happened this week changed my mind.

The team I work in the cases I work on are generally on my case loads for a few months and then closed. There will always be outliers to that which are there a little longer but that has been my experience so far.

I have one person I have been working with for approximately 5 months and I went to visit them this week. This is the fourth time I have seen them due to hospitalisations and periods of time where we were seeing how everything was working before reviewing the situation.

The difficultly is that in that time this person is not the same anymore. When I first got involved, we were organising a move from their own home with a care package to an extra care scheme because they needed just a bit more than could be managed at home. They are now in a nursing home being nursed in bed and requiring 24-hour support.

I work in a team where we support a lot of older people so visiting people who are fully dependant and need a lot of support is nothing new for me. It’s seeing the change that is.

It is the trickiness of a situation where you know that the situation the person is currently in is the last thing, they would have wanted but you cannot do anything about it because their needs are so high now that they can’t be managed elsewhere. I didn’t realise how much I would struggle with that visit. I knew it was going to be difficult and I chatted through that beforehand, but the actual situation was much more difficult that I expected.

I knew that I would have to go and explain to this person what is happening because their dementia has got much worse, so they no longer have the memory or understanding of what is going on. She has enough awareness that she knew how it makes her feel and that was the difficult bit. I did not expect to be having a conversation with someone in their 80s about their wish to fall asleep and not wake up when I started my training.

To be honest when I started my training I didn’t expect to be working with older people, I always wanted to work with children and then situations in my personal life and positive experiences I had on placement changed that for me. I am glad that when I went into my placements that I took everything I could from them but also gave everything I have. I did not sit back and get by doing the bare minimum I took hold of every opportunity, and I am so glad I did because I feel that it has made me the well-rounded practitioner that I am.

I know that I don’t know everything no matter how long I have been somewhere but that is a bit part of Social Work. I have heard many times in courses and seminars how when you feel you know everything its time to leave the industry and the longer, I am in it the more I believe that.